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The Kazanga Ceremony, Kaoma district, and the University of Zambia – Provisional report on a fieldtrip to Zambia, July 2011
with numerous photographs and video clips
by Wim van Binsbergen
text and images © 2011 Wim van Binsbergen
BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION: THE KAZANGA CEREMONY IN TIME AND SPACE
The occasion and focus of Wim van Binsbergen’s 2011 fieldtrip was the Kazanga Ceremony of the Nkoya people, held on a spacious terrain ceded for the purpose in the vicinity of the Kaoma district capital, near the Luena river.
In the 19th century CE, Kazanga was a first-fruits and thanksgiving rite, to be held at the royal capitals of the Nkoya people (especially that of King / Mwene Kahare) on the occasion of the harvesting of the standard crops at the time: kaffircorn, bullrush millet, various types of tubers / yams (the present-day staples maize and cassave are considered to have come as a relatively recent innovations). For Kazanga, all the king’s subjects would come together at the palace, and special beer was brewed, to be offered to the ancestors in a hole in the ground adjacent to the royal shrine (shihanda). In those days, the hole would be lined with the occiput of an immolated slave, and more slaves would be sacrified to the ancestors, their fertilising blood running through furrows into the ground, while the king, in full regalia, after a special, fierce royal dance in which he would brandish his executioner’s axe and his royal flyswitch, would respectfully lie down on the ground in order to drink of the sacrifical beer. After that the king would declare the new crops open for common consumption. (As Wim van Binsbergen witnessed in the early 1970s, in the new cults of affliction that became popular in Western Zambia from c. 1900 CE onwards, the cult leaders – often female – would also stage a first-fruits rite before which the new harvest could not be eaten by the cult adepts – but typically, such rites would focus on newly introduced, allegedly trans-Atlantic crops especially maize.)
Considering the extreme violence and the royal autonomy implied in historical Kazanga (with interesting, but not necessarily historical, parallels with the Ancient Egyptian heb sed royal festival; cf. Wilkinson, T.A.H., 2001, Early dynastic Egypt, London/ New York: Routledge, first published 1999), little wonder that Kazanga went out of practice at the onset (1900) of colonial rule in Northwestern Rhodesia, now Western Zambia – an imposition that reduced most kings to petty administrators of indirect rule. Subsequently, in the course of the 20th century, in response to colonial conditions, modern education, the rise of a modern monetary economy and of a bureaucracy in which education was a key factor, and a colonial policy of indirect rule favouring the Lozi aristocracy of the Central Barotse Flood Plain, Western Zambia saw an intensive process of ethnic group formation, leading to the emergence of a Nkoya ethnicity, increasing Nkoya-Lozi antagonism, the compilation of Nkoya ethnic histories, the affirmation of Nkoya chieftainships even though incorporated in the Lozi neo-traditional aristocracy, and the preservation and revival of ‘Nkoya’ ‘traditional’ culture. A predictable development in all this (also in the light of the more general history of ethnic associations in British Central Africa throughout the 20th century) was the formation of the Kazanga Cultural Association, mainly by moderately educated Nkoya employees living under lower-middle-class conditions (salaried employment, mainly rented and/or institutional housing, sometimes ownership of an old car) in Lusaka, in the early 1980s; clearly their class background was by and large substantially different from that of the 2011 Kazanga Executive. In 1988 the first modern Kazanga Ceremony was held at the palace of Chief Mwene Mutondo, and it then consisted of a veritable inventory of all the varieties of Nkoya musical and dancing expressions, from all spheres of community and individual life: royal ceremony; hunting cults; healing cults; festive celebrations (ruhnwa); female puberty rites (kutembuka), etc. before relatively minor regional and national politicians. Even at that early stage, the musical and dancing expressions were already greatly programmed, standardised and controlled, in the light of imported Christian and school practices and examples from TV and films, and there was already a marked tendency towards folklorisation and virtualisation: divorced from the natural, organic time scale offered by an individual’s or a community’s social, productive and reproductive life cycle under village conditions, Kazanga performances operate within an entirely artificial space (‘the festival grounds’) and an entirely artificial time frame (‘the festival’ and its programme’), with geometrical patterns of arrangement of dancing performances, and tendencies towards uniform clothing and synchronic movements – an orchestration, under the stage directions of troupe leaders and school teachers, and distantly supervised by the Kazanga Executive. All this must be considered to be rather at variance with the individualist, self-competent expressive time-honoured practices of Nkoya village life. Initial analysis of these developments and radical format transformations were given in van Binsbergen’s early studies of Kazanga, which appeared in the 1990s (1994, 1999; click these links for access to the publications in question).
Against this skeleton background, we may begin to understand the 2011 details of Kazanga and such new developments as are marked below. Essentially, the modern revived Kazanga consists of the following sequences:
0. A long-term preparatory
phase, essentially beginning when the previous Kazanga draws to an end, and
consisting in the regular rehearsing of performances at rural and urban
communities and at rural schools throughout the Nkoya-speaking sections of
modern Zambia
1. An immediately preparatory phase, when the regional organisers prepare the festival grounds (erection of shelters, of the central shrine, etc.) and when performers (mainly villagers and school children from all over Nkoyaland) converge to the Kazanga site at the eve of the first day, spend the night there, and prepare for their imminent public performances; surprisingly, no accommodation nor food is provided for these volunteers, whose only reward usually consist of the small financial tips that members of the audience may give them during their performance, and of a uniform imprinted T-shirt and wrapper.
2. The arrival of regional and national dignitaries, mainly government officials and politicians – for them, easy chairs are provided in traditional reed shelters along one end of the Kazanga arena; the great majority of the audience (perhaps 1,000 people, nearly all locals) follows the two days’ proceedings standing on their feet
3. The ceremonial entry, one by one, of each of the attending royal Nkoya Chiefs (usually four: Chiefs Mutondo, Kahare, Momba and Kabulwebulwe), preceded by one or two traditional policemen (kapasu), followed by a small royal orchestra consisting of xylophone and drums, after which a pressing and cheering crowd of would-be subjects of each king follows stirring up an enormous dust cloud – however, as it turns out the same orchestra, and largely overlapping crowds, are used by each chief; in the process, one of the chiefs will bless the first fruits, and/or perform a royal dance reminiscent of the 19th century practices but inevitably without any of the human sacrifices then reputed to be in evidence. Compelling any number of royal chiefs to share the same social and ritual space and to be part of the same ceremony, in itself constitutes a most dramatic innovation as compared to the 19th-century original, when the king was the centre of the local universe and the Kazanga festival was in fact also an expression of a king’s autonomy; traditionally, the king was incomparably exalted, had no equals, the king would eat alone (with his sister to foretaste his food for poison), and the very rare occasion of two kings visiting was surrounded by elaborate taboos so as to compensate for any infringement on either’s autonomy. In this respect Kazanga, and the formal organisation attending to this festival, means a radical departure from historical socio-ritual patterns of interaction, in fact a radical format imposition, which at first the Nkoya chiefs underwent meekly (allowing themselves to be almost reduced to mere puppets in the Executive’s neo-traditional show), but against which (after the renewed Kazanga’s first decade) the Chiefs more and more revolted, resulting in their far more respectful and central place in Kazanga at present. Specifically, bringing any number of royal chiefs together inevitably poses the problem of ownership of the festival grounds: all Nkoya land belonging to one royal chief or another, there is in principle no neutral ground, and the checkered history of Kaoma Kazanga sites since 1988 shows that especially between the two major Kaoma chiefs, Mutondo and Kahare, there has always been friction since one was made to feel the odd person out on a Kazanga ceremony held at the land, even the palace, and around the personal shrine, of the other. This problematic has been with Kazanga to this very day. The logic of the modern formal organisation (which has negotiated for the present Kazanga site to be considered neutral ground) simply cannot be reconciled with the time-honoured logic of kingship, according to which the present Kazanga site is on Chief Mutondo’s land and therefore in principle controlled by the latter (this problem is exacerbated by the fact that Mutondo’s kara shrine is at the heart of the Kazanga arena, whereas no parallel structure is erected – or exists, for that matter, for the Kahare site; an iron pole claimed to constitute the Kahare royal shrine in Northwestern Zambia has no counterpart in Kaoma district). Finally, there is Chief Kahare’s contentious claim to the effect that Kazanga has always been a Kahare institution and has nothing to do with the Mutondo kingship. In 2010 Chief Kahare refused to attend Kazanga; in 2011 he was more co-operative, but had to endure that Mwene Mutondo was far more conspicuous, Kazanga being held on the latter’s land, around the latter’s kara shrine, and with one of its highlights Mutondo’s far more spectacular ceremonial entry combined with public blessing of the crops by the latter.
4. The highest national
dignitary present (in the 2011 case the Zambian Vice-President) is invited to
take the floor and to officially open the Kazanga festival; using musical and
dancing performance in exchange for attention, food and gifts from high-ranking
political figures (formerly from kings, now national-level politicians have
taken the kings’ place in this respect) is a time-honoured and central feature
of Nkoya musical tradition, which surfaces in many traditional Nkoya court
songs; and this feature re-appears in transformed form in present-day
Kazanga. In an overall sense, and looking at the matter with an idealistic eye,
the Nkoya people through musical performances seek to trade local symbolic
production for development projects extented to the rural population by the
national political centre. In a narrower and perhaps somewhat more realistic
sense, one could also say that the small, now predominantly urban-based Nkoya
upper middle class seeks to trade their
poor rural kinsmen’s symbolic production for political and status benefits
to be extended by the Zambian national political centre, not to the rural population at large, but to the Nkoya members of the urban
upper middle class. In recent years this already complex do ut des pattern appears to have further diversified: the
national-level politicians bring not so much development projects, but sheer
promises and claims of recent development achievements, combined with concrete
presents for the chiefs; and the Kazanga Executive offers not only their rural
kinmen’s musical and dancing symbolic production to the national-level
politicians, but also other items of symbolic production. At the 2011 Kaoma
Kazanga, the Zambian Vice-President was publicly and officially presented with
two books: Tears of Rain (already published in 1992 by
Kegan Paul, London…! click for fulltext PDF) written by the official guest of
the Kazanga Executive apparently invited for the purpose, and (over half a
century after publication of the first Nkoya New Testament translation, Testamenta ya yipya) a new translation
of this central Christian text, made by Pastor Smith a resident Southern
Baptist Bible translator from the USA, working from an office at the Kazanga
Patron Mr Shumina’s Kaoma home, so that the honour of presenting this book to
the Vice President fell on Mr Shumina.
5. Opening
by the national chairperson, with votes of thanks to all concerned, a review of
recent achievements by the Kazanga Executive, and usually strategic
pronouncements intended to curry favour with the assembled national-level
politicians.
6. The rest of the first
day, and the whole of the next day (which however begins rather late, among
other reasons because the performers, for the second night in row, have
invested much of their energy and enthousiasm to dance, play and sing among
themselves throughout the night – perhaps the most inspiring and creative part
of the entire festival!), are spend on one performance after the other of the
troupes that have registered for Kazanga and that have intensively rehearsed
their performance in previous months.
7. Towards
the end Kazanga fizzles out informally, without any ceremonial exit of the
national-level politicians or the chiefs. In 2011, the last formal item was to
announce the two winning troupes of an inter-school Kazanga competition between
the various regional school troupes, as a testimony that Kazanga had further
drifted from the organic village context and towards folklorisation.
These various phases are in principle announced and specified by the masters of ceremony (members of the Kazanga Executive) via an effective, electrical public address system, but in practice the names of the various troupes, their provenance, and the musical and dancing genres which they are presenting, get very little formal attention, the announcements are very short, lack all specific cultural explanation or background information, and are drowned in the general melee also because there are hardly any copies of the programme available for distribution; such programme as there is, merely lists the political highlights of the proceedings, without any specification of the many specific troupes – as if these have already been relegated to the status of a mere interchangeable, inarticulate backdrop to the Executive members’ political and status ambitions.
It appears from video registrations
(for instance one from the Zambia Broadcasting Corporation, Lusaka, 2010: Kabompo Kazanga Ceremony 2010, DVD) that
the original, rich variety of all Nkoya musical and dancing expressions was
still somewhat present in the, more homely and rural, less tightly organised and less
politically appropriated, Kabompo Kazanga of 2010; by contrast, the Kaoma
Kazanga of 2011 turned out to be somewhat eroded in that the range of genres
had been severely limited (no hunters’ and healers’ performances probably because
these are inevitably pre-Christian and meet with Christian opposition; only one
demonstration of a girl’s coming-out dance kutembuka; and only a very
short and little highlighted performance of Chief Kahare’s royal dance), so
that what we end up with is an endless series of girls going through the same
tightly organised but repetitive sequences of (a) slowly making their
appearance in single file in front of a lead singer next to the drummers and
xylophone, (b) then taking their places according to a geometric grid, then (c)
diversifying their movements whilst gradually members of the audience cut their
own cross-cutting lines through the dancers’ geometric arrangements, and (d)
towards the end dancing while seated on the ground alternating with the virtuoso
movements of hips and buttocks (as of fleeing duiker antelopes) of which Nkoya
girls (all of whom have received extensive puberty training to actively and
independently move their abdomens in view of their prospective sexual roles) appear to
have the monopoly; and finally (e) respectful clapping of hands while seated,
in reverence of the Chiefs.
After this
introduction to Kazanga in general, we shall now trace the details of this
research trip, by commenting extensively on successive series of photographs;
per series, the comments are numbered from left to right. Occasionally we shall
take the opportunity to introduce short videos to bring out more of the
dynamics of Kazanga and of other aspects of this research trip.
A demonstration of the Nkoya female puberty-rites at
Kazanga 2011 can be seen in the following video clips:
description: Seconded by a
much younger girl, and from a distance vocally supported by an ensemble of
girls and women accompanied by several male drummers, a pubescent girl of the
Nkoya people, Zambia, demonstrates the coming-out dance that constitutes the
conclusion of female puberty rites among this people. This demonstration was
part of the musical performances at the 2011 Kazanga ceremony, Kaoma district,
Zambia.
description: After their
solemn coming-out dance proper as part of the puberty rites of the Nkoya
people, which is shown on the above video, and still vocally supported by an
ensemble of girls and women accompanied by several male drummers, the two girls
involved show their dexterity in a more lively and playful musical performance,
which however strikingly resembles the Nkoya sacred makwasha dance strictly
reserved for the elderly of both genders. One elder in fact comes up from the
audience to join the dance for a few seconds. This demonstration was part of
the musical performances at the 2011 Kazanga ceremony, Kaoma district, Zambia.
SCENES
FROM LUSAKA
1, 2 A working dinner of the Executive Committee of the Kazanga
Cultural Association, at the National Assembly Motel, Lusaka, 5 July 2011, on
the occasion of Wim van Binsbergen’s arrival as guest of the Kazanga Cultural
Association; the National Assembly Motel is a highly subsidised venue where
Members of Parliament and diplomats temporarily staying in the capital tend to
converge; for the occasion also a few members of the Interim Nkoya Royal
Council have been invited, a recently established group of senior courtiers
close to the palaces of the Nkoya Chiefs that participate in Kazanga; note (1
right with mobile phone) the Association’s Patron, Mr Crispin Shumina, holding
an MA in history from the University of Zambia, and after a spell of teaching
in Botswana and 10 years as Member of the Zambian Parliament, now the Zambian Embassy
Secretary for Education in Malaysia; also, note the National Chairperson Mrs
Freda Luhila (2, left) – she is the wife of the Zambian High Commissioner
Nigeria, owner of a Zambian bus company in her own right, daughter of sub-Chief
Muleka who for many years was president of Local Court in Chief’s Kahare area
(Kaoma district), and in the first half of 2011 she was seeking adoption as
candidate to stand for Member of Parliament in a partly Nkoya constituency
during the imminent National elections, until she was rejected just prior to
Kazanga; also note (2 fourth from left) Mrs Catherine Liato, reputed to be of
mixed Nkoya-Luvale descent, employed at the National Milling Corporation,
Lusaka, and likewise seeking adoption as candidate to stand for Member of
Parliament in a (different) partly Nkoya constituency during the imminent
National elections, until she too was rejected soon after Kazanga; 3 At the
Zambia Broadcasting Corporation headquarters, Lusaka, members of the Kazanga
Executive, and Wim van Binsbergen, are being interviewed for an item on Morning
TV, to be broadcast 11 July 2011; 4 In preparation of the imminent Kabompo
Kazanga ceremony, of whose organising committee he is the Chairman, Mr Shiyama
Kutoha (see below) has ordered a new festive chilimba xylophone (as distinct from the mobile,
royal type) to be custom-built in a peri-urban Mbwela village, some 10 km North
of Lusaka; 400 km from their present core lands, what appear to be
Nkoya-speaking offshoots of Western Zambian groups (or local remnants of an
ancient Nkoya substrate extending from Kasai and Angola all the way to Central
Zambia and the Victoria Falls?) have lived in Central Zambia for over a
century, and already in the first years of my Nkoya research (1970s) the
musical instruments for urban sessions of possession cults and female puberty
rites used to be borrowed (often by me personally) from Chief Mungule’s area in
the same periurban area.
Unable to
obtain an original copy of the Zambia Broadcasting Corporation broadcast, I
here present a clip based on my own recording directly from TV, with excuses
for the inevitably poor quality
1 The initiator of the alternative, Kabompo Kazanga in
Northwestern Province (since 2010), Mr Shiyama Kutoha, with some of his Kabompo
Kazanga associates, in interview with Wim van Binsbergen, at the Protea Arcades
hotel, Lusaka; Mr Kutoha works for an organisation facilitating the performance
of Members of Parliament, is a fully-fledged and active member of the Kazanga
Executive with a knack for fund-raising, and one of the masters of ceremony at
Kaoma Kazanga 2011, where he excels in reciting the many ancient praisenames of
Chiefs; 2 sponsoring is in many ways the key, and also the temptation, of
Kazanga today – this is the 2011 Kabompo Kazanga T-shirt, for the ceremony
scheduled to take place early August 2011; 3 One week before Kazanga in Kaoma
(400 km West of Lusaka), members of the Kanyama Kazanga troupe directed by the
gifted Nkoya singer and composer Mr Tom Town, have a rehearsal at an open space
in their low-class Lusaka neighbourhood, and take the opportunity of welcoming
Wim van Binsbergen / Tatashikanda with an old song once composed in his honour
in 1992, when he officially presented his 1992 book Tears of Rain (click) to Chiefs and
politicians; 4: young women as dancers and singers, and young men as players of
xylophones and drums, are the heart of the explosion of musical and dancing
production that is the essence of Kazanga – while given to various forms of
innovation, standardisation, folklorisation, virtualisation, commoditification
and political appropriation and manipulation which Wim van Binsbergen has
explored (exposed?) in his earlier studies of Kazanga (1994, 1999; click these links for access to the publications in
question),
yet all this does not fundamentally erode the splendour of Nkoya musical
creativity, nor the tremendously important function of the Kazanga ceremony as
the one annual occasion to revive this rich repertoire, to collectively
practice for months in order to bring it out in the best possible way, and to
sustain the web of translocal social, organisational, financial and ethnic
relations that forms the backbone of the practical realisation of Kazanga.
Interestingly, the contradictions that make up Kazanga today are not just those
between Nkoya and the national state, or between Nkoya and other Zambian ethnic
groups, or between the politically-aspiring urban upper middle class and the
powerless rural poor, but also
a. between artistically self-confident and masterful young
(sometimes very young) women and men, on the one hand, and
b. a largely artistically passive middle-aged and older category
consisting of the audiences, the Chiefs, the politicians, and the urban
controllers loosely (and practically without any accountability to the urban
grass-roots level) organised within the Kazanga Executive, on the other
hand.
SCENES
OF CURRENT NKOYA LIFE IN EASTERN KAOMA DISTRICT
1 Nightfall at the highly developed TBZ agricultural centre, on
the Lusaka-Kaoma tar road just west of Kafue Park; 2 rudimentary paintings on a
house in Munkuye; 3 stopping by at a Munkuye village; 4 the old Mumbwa-Kaoma
road at Munkuye
1, 2 Happy memories: the surprisingly unchanged 2011 appearance of
Shumbanyama village, Kazo valley, Chief Kahare’s area, where Wim van Binsbergen
spent many happy research days since 1972 – over the decades, the members of
this village have been a family of renowned traditional healers, who despite
the inroads of Christianity have largely continued to practice the historical
Nkoya religion including its 19th-century CE development into non-ancestral,
alien and possibly originally South Asian cults of affliction (cf. Wim van
Binsbergen’s 1981 book Religious change
in Zambia, also
available online as Google Book; click the link) – the text on the
house reads in the familiar Nkoya version of vernacularised English checha
aflican dokota, ‘African Doctor’s Church’, and demonstrates that, although
in increasingly Christian trappings, the family has remained faithful to its
historical calling; 3, 4 In 1978 Wim van Binsbergen with the help of Ms.
Nalishuwa and the blessing of his adoptive father Mwene Kahare Kabambi
organised the people of Njonjolo into an effective (though slow-working)
self-help group towards the construction of a much-need rural health centre to
be build with Dutch N.G.O. money – and this is what ultimately grew out of that
initiative, with conclusive help (around 1988) from the Seventh-Day Adventists;
however, the clinic was finished at a cost: staunch Christians, the Seventh-Day
Adventists made it a condition of their contribution that the Chief’s drums,
twice daily addressing royal ancestors in terms of a pre-Christian world-view,
would henceforth remain silent, and that condition was met.
1 Standing beside the palace’s arboreal ancestral shrine (shihanda),
the present Chief Kahare, donning his main regalia (wearing the headband on
which zimpande – Conus-shell bottoms, in South Central Africa a central sign of
kingship – have been mounted, while holding his eland-tail hefu
flyswitch and his royal executioner’s axe) sounds the double royal gongs (thingongi)
in order to announce to the ancestors the felicitous return of the adoptive
prince Tatashikanda – Wim van Binsbergen; 2 The same Chief Kahare in his royal
hall, squarely in front of two posters depicting the current Zambian president;
3 A rather revolutionary new development: Chief Kahare’s Prime Minister (Mwanashihemi),
who already served the Chief’s predecessor Mwene Kahare Kubama II Yeshi, now no
longer sits on a reed mat on the floor with his legs awkwardly folded
underneath, but has a lounge chair of his own, identical to that of the Chief –
however, when he takes the floor in the literal sense of addressing the Chief
or the meeting at large, he goes down from that chair to adopt the traditional
position; another marked change at this palace is that, contrary to the
situation in the 1970s, there is no longer a state-subsidised royal orchestra
(the subsidy derived from the – now heavily contested – 1964 Barotse
Agreement and was far below minimum wage level anyway) to play and sing
the traditional Nkoya court songs every morning and evening to indicate that
the Chief was in his palace, and well – this means that, as far as royal court
music is concerned, Kazanga now keeps alive, albeit in a performative and
otherwise rather alien format, a major form of musical tradition which
otherwise would not survive at all – this musical tradition, and his text, was
splendidly recorded in Dr Ed Brown’s PhD thesis ‘Drums of life’ (1984, Ann
Arbor University Microfilms); 4 The present Chief Kahare acceded to the throne
in 2002, and is reminded here by senior courtiers of the book that, immediately
after its appearance in 1992, was officially presented to his predecessor Mwene
Kahare Kabambi: Wim van Binsbergen’s Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in Central Western
Zambia.
1 Chief Kahare’s main drums today; 2 In the few village shops at
Kalale, in the eastern part of Kaoma district where the road branches off to
Chief Kahare’s palace 20 km South, the sale of cellphone topping-up (in Zambian
English: ‘airtime’; here of the Airtel brand) has become a major commodity –
even villagers without a regular cash income have now come to rely on their
mobile phones for part of their day-to-day communication; this results in an
enormous financial and logistic strain (usually cellphone credit can only be
afforded for a few minutes at the time; another expense is that one needs to
hire access to the odd villager’s solar cells in order to regularly charge the
cell phone) yet seems to be worthwhile, even indispensible now; 2 parabolic
aerials, solar cells and accumulators, and a Blueberry state-of-the-art
telephone, enable Mr Stanford Mayowe to live at TBZ and yet be part of a
worldwide network – one of the first Nkoya to obtain a bachelor’s degree,
former director of a Zambian parastatal, enjoying retirement since 1988,
Kazanga chairman in the mid-1990s, a defeated contender for the Kahare
Chieftainship in 1994 and 2002, Mr Mayowe (Wim van Binsbergen / Tatashikanda’s yaya i.e. classificatory elder brother)
is now the Chairperson of a newly established Game Management Board immediately
adjacent to the game reserve of Kafue Nationa Park, with direct access to the
global resources of World Wildlife Fund, and organised in such a way that Chief
Kahare receives 5% of all the Board’s revenue from game viewing, hunting
licenses etc, while another part of the revenue is used for development
projects benefitting the resident villages and keeping alive their interest in
community game management as a viable alternative to poaching; in the 1970s,
most meals I was served at Njonjolo or Kazo had poached game meat as relish,
whereas today such meat is no longer obtainable; 4 as a result, the traveller
crossing Kafue National Park along the main tar road can now spot far more game
than ever before in the time of my Nkoya fieldwork.
SCENES FROM KAZANGA 2011
1 The ladies Liato (left) and Luhila, the National Secretary and
the National Chairperson, respectively, of the Kazanga Cultural Association; 2
Immediately after his arrival by airplane (on the otherwise defunct airstrip of
Kaoma) the Vice-President delivers a spirited party-political address prior to
proceeding to the Kazanga site, where formally all party politics is supposed
to be banned (although both the Vice-President and the National Chairperson get
away with a considerable amount of politicking); 3 more young girls – the
veritable heart of Kazanga artistry and beauty
The following video gives an impression of the stnadardsequences
of teenage female dancing in the context of Kazanga 2011-08-16
description: A uniformed
troupe of young girls, accompanied by young men playing drums and xylophone, show
the typical sequences of teenage female dancing of the Nkoya people of Zambia.
In this genre of dancing, like in the coming-out dance of the female puberty
rite, emphasis is on dextrous movements of hips, buttocks and abdomen,
accentuated by a thick roll of textile. For such movements the girls receive
specific, prolonged training, apparently in preparation of their adult sexual
roles. The typical sequence goes from the troupe’s entry in single file towards
the lead singer, then the occupation of the dancing arena, the adoption of a
squatting or kneeling position, then saluting and exit.
1 In the first years after Kazanga was revived in the late 1980s,
elderly people cherished this opportunity to dance on their favourite music,
unheedful of any protocol or programming, and dressing up in ancient attire
especially bark cloth and bringing their ceremonial dancing axes and hoes; this
element has greatly diminished by now, but still elderly people can be seen to
join formal, established dancing groups for a few moments; it is as if the
dancing group creates an energised space (ultimately a sacred space, implicitly geared to the worship of nature, the
ancestors, and the High God Nyambi), which the audience – of whatever age or
gender – is supposed to actively invade and traverse so as to partake of, add
to, and disseminate, its instant sacrality; 2 the circumcision- and
metalworking-related low thatched shrine (kara) of Chief Mutondo’s capital (a sacred
chunck of iron ore is habitally kept there) is temporarily moved to the Kazanga
site for the duration of the ceremony, and furnished with that shrine’s
habitual ancestral representations – nearly the only pieces (apart from some
items in the Livingstone Museum’s collection) of Nkoya representative art that have
survived the onslaught of Christianity and of grassroots-based witchcraft
eradication campaigns from the 1930s onward; besides the disconcertingly
prominent advertisement for the mobile telephone network Airtel (the green
vertical banner), a new addition to the Kazanga repertoire is the lady who is de facto functioning as a
shrine priestess and who mixes in many of the royal and other dancing
performances and processions; she emulates, in many ways, the historic role of
the Chief’s sister, who is the Chief’s inseparable companion (ritual
intercourse with her on the eve of the Chief’s installation is a prerequisite
for legitimate kingship); the male chief’s royal prerogatives seem to largely
derive from her, as is clear from several song texts and from the myth of
Shihoka Nalinanga and his sister as recounted in Likota lya Bankoya; 3 During Kazanga each Chief occupies, with his
or her retinue, a temporary palace made of beautiful traditional, perishable
materials – pointed poles, reed, thatch, and bark rope; note the goat in the
background, eponymous of a major Nkoya clan, but rarely seen in Nkoya villages
in previous decades; 4 In the face of decades of Nkoya-Lozi animosities, which
have only acerbated in 1990s and early 2000s under the Chieftainship of Mwene
Kahare Kubama II (Yeshi), and which also left a deeply traumatic mark on the
succession of the present Chief Kahare in 2002, it is a positive sign to note
the presence of a ‘traditionally’ attired Lozi Prince from the Lozi heartland
(as distinct from Naliele, a settlement near the Kaoma district capital where
in the 1930s a junior Lozi chief was installed in defiance of the regional
Nkoya chiefs Kahare and Mutondo). Again, present-day Kazanga can be seen to
function as a context not for ethnic divisiveness, but for ethnic
accommodation. One might also say that,
after dominating Zambian national and regional politics for decades, ethnicity
as a central binding idiom now seems to be on its way out in present-day
Zambia, giving way to a more immediate articulation of the class contradictions
which ethnic discourse has so often managed to conceal. Hence the potential
of Kazanga to serve political and class interest under the deceptive cloak of
the articulation and celebration of a shared ethnic culture, that of the Nkoya.
It seems true to say that, in 2011, Kazanga is no longer primarily about the
particularist expression of one distinct ethnic identity among the dozen that
allegedly make up postcolonial Zambian society – for the elderly close to the
royal palaces, with specific memories of (real or imagined) wrongs collectively
suffered at the hands of the Lozi, there may still be that element of
particularist ethnic expression in contradistinction from other ethnic
identities especially that of the Lozi, but the majority of the (eminently youthful!)
performers and of the audience, seems to follow rather a global media trend in
that Kazanga for them seems in the first place a musical / dancing expression
of engaging with music and dance, in their own right, as something beautiful,
as something re-uniting body, mind, society and non-human environment, as a
form of autonomously and competently produced art that counteracts alienation,
poverty and powerlessness, and not in the
first place as a boundary marker vis-a-vis other ethnic groups. However,
there is also an alternative movement, towards the growth of Nkoyaness as a
‘super-tribe’, far extending beyond the confines of the traditionally
recognised Nkoya heartland around Kaoma district (formerly called Mankoya
district; north of which the Nkoya wooded area at the confluence of the Zambezi
and Kabompo rivers may be found which appears to have been one of the source of
Nkoya as an ethnonym), to discover and enlist under the Kazanga umbrella
Nkoya-speaking groups in Southern Zambia near Livingstone (Mwene Momba), Mumbwa
district (Mwene Kabulwebulwe), Kabompo district (Mwene Kangombe ka Maha), and
the gradual emergence of the idea now articulated among some educated Nkoya
(with or without an objective historical basis, that remains to be ascertained
in future research) of a pan-Nkoya
substrate extending from Angola, Southern Congo, Northeastern Namibia and
Northern Botswana, to Central Zambia (Mbwela, Lenje) and perhaps Northwestern
Zimbabwe.
1 A few members of the Kazanga Executive act as masters of
ceremony, dressed in nylon-carpet shifts emulating a zebra-skin pattern – note
the emphasis (the tripods, the TV camera) on the urban elite’s recording and
vicarious appropriation of their ‘rural home culture’, which has been one of
the main features of Kazanga from the beginning: nostalgicand distancing electronic
appropriation, instead of social mixing and sharing in the competent musical
performance of the villagers and school children; 2 a very few
urbanites (and no tourists!) are lost in the crowd but make the best of it; 3
high-ranking courtiers dressed in Lunda-type white-seamed blue wrappers bring
hommage to Chief Momba after his ceremonial entry; 4 female Chief Kabulwebulwe
makes her ceremonial entry, note the portable xylophone which is the heart of
the Nkoya royal orchestra – the latter, in the case of these processions,
functions as a marching band
1 Chief Mutondo makes his ceremonial entry, and in the process
blesses this year’s new crops on display next to the central shrine; 2 Chiefs
Kahare and Kabulwebulwe (a lady) seated in state; 3 Chief Kahare makes his
ceremonial entry; 4 apart from court music played during the royal processions,
most of the musical and dancing performances at Kazanga are in the hands of
young women and girls, with young men acting as musicians – some groups are
school-based, others community-based in Western Zambia and Lusaka; again, by
comparison with the early years of the revived Kazanga, the 2011 repertoire is
regrettably somewhat amorphous, repetitive and uniform – one can hardly escape
the impression that, even more so that in the initial years, the Executive’s
central interest focuses on political networking at the national level, while
they are less interested, and because of their personal life history and
upbringing less competent, in the specificities of the cultural production –
the latter they leave to the villagers, with whom most members of the Executive
have very little in common, with whom they have little social interaction
beyond perfunctory formal greetings, and whose artistic mastery they neither
share nor seem able to appreciate in full detail
the following video shows how Mwene Mutondo blesses the year’s new
harvest prior to taking his seat among the traditional and modern dignitaries
at kazanga 2011
description: One of the
four royal Chiefs of the Nkoya people (Zambia) to take part in the 2011 Kazanga
ceremony, Chief Mwene Mutondo, accompanied by a shrine priestess and
traditional court policemen (kapasu) and followed by his royal orchestra of
portable royal xylophone, drums, and chief’s bells, goes around the kara shrine
(a temporary copy of a similar shrine at his distant palace, built on the
Kazanga grounds for the duration of the ceremony) and, by lifting the
speciments of newly harvested traditional crops, imparts his blessing to them
by rhythmic movements of his royal eland-antelope flyswitch.
the following video presents one of the
most famous, ancient solemn court songs of the Nkoya people, performed after
Mwene Mutondo had made his ceremonial entry at Kazanga 2011. A characteristic of this genre is that the court women
(princesses and queens) accompany the general singing with ululating. The
recording is far from stable because the author could not refrain himself, like
all others present, to dance to this sacred music in honour of the king and his
ancestors
Zambian Vice-President (respectfully squatting in salutation, just
right of the reed pillar) brings big presents for the Nkoya chiefs: a bicycle,
and a refrigerator; 2 a delegation from Eastern Province representing Chief
Mpenzeni of the Ngoni people also brings presents; 3 Chief Kahare contributes a
royal dance to Kazanga 2011; 4 the Zambian Vice-President pronounces his
opening speech, which while being development-orientated is clearly geared
towards the imminent national elections and seeks to win the assembled Nkoya
voters for the currently ruling party M.M.D.
1 New developments: a Lunda delegation to this Nkoya ceremony
(their heads lavishly sprinkled with white talcum powder in emulation of sacred
white kaolin – mpemba) brings presents for the chiefs; 2 So does
(despite decades of Lozi-Nkoya friction) a Lozi delegation, donning the red
barets of Kuomboka (i.e. the Lozi or Barotse Annual Royal Transhumance
Ceremony) rowers – apparently this neo-traditional attire in red, black
and white has crystallised in very recent decades, for during Wim van
Binsbergen’s research visits to Limulunga and Naliele in the 1970s, this attire
was not conspicuous then; 3 female drummers are no longer anathema as they were
until a few decades ago; 4 While some singers at Kazanga now aptly adopt global
pop singers’ stances, in the foreground more time-honoured forms of performance
can be seen: a dancer balances a bottle on a stick in his mouth, and another is
disguised as a featureless sprite.
The following video shows
the dancing of one of the uniformed troupes, and highlights the performative
style of one young girl as lead singer
description: A highly enthusiastic pubescent girl, dressed in the uniform of
her troupe, emulates global pop-music stances when performing as lead singer of
a dancing group of women of various ages, accompanied by men and women playing
xylophone and drums, at the 2011 Kazanga ceremony, Kaoma, Zambia. Close
supervision and direction, and virtualisation of the musical and dancing
formats of time-honoured village life, through uniform clothing, concerted dancing
movements, and geometric spatial arrangements, are general features of the
music and dance of the Nkoya people (Zambia) as performed at the annual Kazanga
ceremony since 1988. However, this is not only a process of erosion and loss.
Occasionally we see the emergence of an incipient new local style, which also
selectively takes on elements of global pop music mediated through TV, video
and the Internet.
However, not all troupes performing at Kazanga follow the
tendencies towards uniformity, stage-direction and gematric patterns., as is
clear from the following video of a more relaxed and informal, festive music
and dance format:
description: Relaxed and
informal festive ‘ruhnwa’ music and dancing of the Nkoya people, performed at
the 2011 Kazanga ceremony by a non-uniformed group of village women of various
ages and some men, with a male singer and accompanied by men playing xylophone
and drums. Close supervision and direction, and virtualisation of the musical
and dancing formats of time-honoured village life, through uniform clothing,
concerted dancing movements, and geometric spatial arrangements, have in recent
decades become general features of the music and dance of the Nkoya people
(Zambia) as performed at the annual Kazanga ceremony since 1988. However, the
present performance remains practically free of this format imposition and
virtualising transformation. It was part of the musical performances at the
2011 Kazanga ceremony, Kaoma district, Zambia.
1 towards the evening; 2 kara (central shrine) priests; 3 makishi
masked dancers as a Luvale and Lunda contribution to this Nkoya ceremony; 4
flanked by two other members of the Executive, the Kazanga National Chairperson
(second from right) issues rewards (red imprinted wrappers) to two winning
dancing troupes from regional schools, including one from Naliele –
surprisingly and reassuringly, because this site of a Lozi royal establishment
inside Kaoma district has been a major bone of contention in Nkoya history of
the past 70 years, including the last two decades; moreover, the
Naliele school teacher in charge of that school’s Kazanga troupe is not Nkoya
but Luvale. Thus present-day Kazanga is
no longer a defiant affirmation of sheer Nkoyaness in opposition to, and
exclusion of, other ethnic groups, but rather a splendid context for
inter-ethnic accommodation and reconciliation.
AMONG
ROYALTY
1 After Kazanga, a long meeting of Mwene Mutondo’s royal council
in the temporary palace as occupied during Kazanga, was convened in
order to deliberate
upon the most honourable proposal, on the part of (selected members of) the
Kazanga Executive and of the Interim Nkoya Royal Council, to appoint Wim van
Binsbergen / Tatashikanda as the induna / sub-chief in charge of the Kazanga ceremonial area –
with all the implications of lingering Kahare-Mutondo conflict indicated
elsewhere in this report, even further acerbated by the fact that for 40 years,
this researcher’s identification has been not with the Mutondo but with the
Kahare kingship; although Chief Mutondo has concluded the matter with the
unmistakable words Tubitambula
na maboko babili ‘I as king welcome him with both hands’, we better patiently
await the final outcome of this decision-making process; 2 Mwene Mutondo on
that occasion – while the Chief sits on a simple throne, in this temporary palace all others
present are still to sit on the ground with their legs folded underneath; 3 Wim
van Binsbergen (background centre) interview sub-chief Mwene Yuvwenu (seated on
his royal stool and holding his royal flyswitch, second from left) in the
presence of Mwene Yuvwenu’s son (left) and two members of the Kazanga Executive
(right)
EXPLORING THE POSSIBILITY OF CONCENTRATION AND CLOSER CO-OPERATION IN AFRICANIST RESEARCH
As a member of the African Studies Centre,
Leiden University, the Netherlands, Wim van Binsbergen has also taken the
opportunity of this fieldtrip to look into broader possibilities of research
co-operation and research strategy at the regional and national level in
Zambia, in that connection especially reviving his long-standing intellectual
and institutional contacts with the University of Zambia, where he was a
Lecturer of Sociology in 1971-74, and subsequently for many years an affiliate
of the Institute for African Studies (formerly Rhodes-Livingstone Institute,
now Institute for Economic and Social Research – INESOR).
1 the UNZA library; 2 INESOR Director Prof. Mubiana Macwangi; 3
the INESOR Library, and 4 general view of INESOR, still strongly reminiscent of
the days of its predecessor, the famous Rhodes-Livingstone Institute
REVIVING
OLD FAMILY TIES
In field research spanning 40 years, one may cease to be a
visitor, and end up by becoming a relative. Wim van Binsbergen with his adoptive
brother (his sometime research assistant Mr Dennis Shiyowe) and sister-in-law,
sister, and (classificatory) children and grandchildren, some of whom have
extensively featured in his writings on the Nkoya; with Princess Mary
Nalishuwa, former member of the Kaoma Rural Council – another major contributor
towards his Nkoya research; and with his adoptive cross-cousin (mufwala) Rev. Kambita, one of the first Chairmen
of the Kazanga Cultural Association, and one of the few prominent supporters of
Mr Shiyama Kutoha’s initiative to start of Kazanga in Kabompo, Northwestern
Province (2010).